World vol. 10 no. 2980

WHITED SEPULCHRES.
Anna Dickinson Among the Mormons—Revelations of Harem Life and Woman Slavery—Brigham Young Don't Know His Own Children—A Racy Sketch of Society in Salt City.
[From the Boston Journal, 13th.]
Miss Anna Dickinson delivered her new lecture on ''Whited Sepulchres; or, Salt Lake City," on Tues-day evening, at Music Hall. She commenced her address by quoting the old proverb of ''See Rome and die." The new adage should read, "See Salt Lake City and live—live to work." She was aware that there was a growing sentiment in America against work; it was a growing feeling that men should learn from nature and not exert themselves. She had noticed in California that on the prairies there was an immense variety of wild oats and other kinds of crops and herbage that had been there time out of knowledge, and would probably continue time without thought. There were places on that Pacific land, that reached over the length and breadth of it, that had never been cultivated, but which were so beautiful as almost to call out the remark of Charles the Emperor, that "Florence was too pleasant to be looked upon only on holy days." Beautiful as the place was, however, it needed to be cultivated. As she travelled to and fro the streets of the new Sodom (Salt Lake City), and looked into people's faces and considered their existence, and looked at the evil in their midst, and thought of its continuance and the utter absolute carelessness of the people to this thing and about it, and saw how the evil was going on day by day; seeing this, she could not help re-cognizing the measure of damnation that was being filled up against all people that did not exert them-selves in the matter; she stood still and lifted up the voice of her soul and asked to die. But then she would like to live, knowing that there was a work to be done for the elevation of humanity. It was at the close of a beautiful June day that she first looked upon the city of the saints—a vast level stretch of plain; an inland sea of sapphire, reflecting a sapphire sky; range after range of mountains glowing through a marvel-lously clear air, whilst over all ranged the diamond bridge of the eternal wall of snow. In the midst of such a scene rose this whited sepulchre, fair unto the eye, pleasant to the contemplation of the traveller, but whose inhabitants were in the depths of hell. Wide, clean streets, miracles of cleanliness to the Eastern eye, with a stream flowing down the principal avenue, and little branch rivulets flowing through the gutters, so that one might drink the nectar of the gods from his front door. Each hut standing on its own patch of ground, literally sur-rounded and swamped by a mass of greenery, with flowers and shrubs loaded with their productions. Cleanliness, order, quiet—too quiet, in fact, as a stagnant pool was quieter than the flowing brook, but it could not be said to be purer—order perfect, quiet absolute; for the man who ruled Utah and Salt Lake had brains—brains sufficient, if they pleased, to govern this country or any other. Nowhere was there more absolute despotism, a more com-plete illustration of the power of a hierarchy than in the person of Brigham Young. When that man died—and God hasten the day—the bottom virtually dropped out of the tub. Heaven hasten the day! she said, although there would be a vast amount of inconceivably dirty water spilled over the world. The man's power was absolute: he was head of the church and head of the State; he was absolute in authority—religious, civil, military. The territory was districted, the city was districted, and over each of these districts was one of Young's intelligent tools, who was a bishop, a civil magistrate, and a judge of elections at the same time. Utah was not a Territory of the Republic, it was a kingdom of Mormonism; it was not a part of the United States, it was a domain of Brigham Young. The elections there were by ballot, but yet they had the worst features of our open vote, for the system was so under the espionage of these men who presided over districts that each man's vote was known to the authorities, and the voter was accordingly immedi-ately recognized as a faithful follower, a devout brother of the church, to be rewarded and trusted; or he was a renegade, and was hunted down. Every disaffection that grew to open revolt in Utah was speedily done away with by assassination. Regular military organization, each man trained to arms, hatred to the government of the country, were inculcated in a system preached, once a month at least, in which a long list of their grievances against the United States were recounted; a system in which the people were told that the United States had no legal authority over them, and yet enjoining absolute subjugation to their own President, who had a revelation direct from heaven, which he an-nounced the next Sabbath morning, when the wis-dom of government or anything relating to his prop-erty was called into question. And he was always obeyed, even to the giving one-fifth of their subsis-tence—for the benefit of tke church, of course—although Young went to Salt Lake a poor man, and was now the third depositor in the Bank of England. The strangest part of it was that there was not a man in authority in the Territory who was not an American—Ameri-can brains monopolized the houses, the lands, the profits, the emoluments, and the wives. There was a very common mistake in regard to Utah, and that was that the women far outnumbered the men. Such was not the case; there were really more men than women. A great many had but one wife; the majority had no wives at all. The bishops of the church, the apostles, the elders, and the governors of districts, have the money whereby they could support wives, and the young girls there, knowing that they would have an unhappy time if they mar-ried a poor man, looked after the comforts as much as possible. The theory of polygamy was universal-ly adopted, believed, and supported by their lips and by their hearts, but it was not universally put into practice for the simple reason that there was not women enough to carry it out. Order, cleanliness, quiet, peace, on the one side; on the other no schools—the speaker begged pardon, there were schools, buildings that would accommodate 100 to 300 pupils—but they were private family schools, one owned by Brigham Young, and that was filled with his offspring, and others belonging to the promi-nent men there, all crowded, but still belonging to one family. No free schools, no general system of education, no libraries, no reading-rooms, no morality in the streets or in the theatre. The last named institution, like everything else of any value, was Brigham's own property. There was no happi-ness. The people wore a stolid, heavy counte-nance, and their laughter was without mirth. She had gone into the places they called homes, or at least where they lived, and found that as one wife after another came into the room they dropped a little curtesy and fell into a chair, and behaved not as wives, but as tolerated servitors in the presence of a chief. She had seen the children there, and as she heard of five out of six dying, and looked at the puny, sunken, stunted animals that remained, she could not help crying in bitterness to God that they too might be in their graves. She had looked into the houses and saw half a dozen rooms and half a dozen wives; in the theatre, where one man would be attended by a score of women, all of them his wives; where the half circle would be crowded with young girls, the daughters of one man, but the daughters of forty-three differ-ent living women. She heard stories bandied about the streets that Brigham Young would admire girls and afterwards discover they were his own daugh-ters, and about Brigham's son Joseph, who excused himself from the society of United States officers on the ground that he wanted to go and make love to one of his mothers. She had met gentlemen, not illiterate creatures, but men of honor and respecta-bility, and trusted and lifted into the high places of the land by the consent of the people about them, who, in talking of Utah, made remarks which were particularly pleasant for a woman, who loved her own sex, to hear. They thought Salt Lake a capital place, separations were easy, and divorces could be had almost for the asking. How would these men like their own wives, when off on a summer vaca-tion, to speak and act as they, their lords, did. One circumstance that happened to her was amusing. The night she arrived in the city a serenade was given to some one in the hotel—it was not meant for her—and after a while some one cried for "Miss Dickinson." A dispute took place as to whether it was “Miss” or “Mister”—for these people were in the same difficulty respect-ing what are termed strong minded people as the Americans were, and so the problem was solved by some one shouting “Bring it out.” On Sunday she went to their Tabernacle, and saw there sitting in the high places, well met, well received, John Todd; heard him preach a sermon wherein he apostrophized all these people as “fellow sinners and brethren!” She heard him tell a story wherein it was stated that, differences of creed notwithstanding, all good people were sure of eternal salvation. He did not say Mor-mons by word, but if not by implication then what was the story worth? and why was it told? and why in the presence of those people did he say that there was nothing necessary to their salvation but faith in Christ? Who were the men before him? There was Bishop Johnson, whose wives included four sisters and two nieces, and George D. Watt, a church reporter, married to, among others, his own half-sister, and Bolton, hav ing a mother and daughter among his wives, and a host of men who count their twenty and more wives. These were the men with whom this man claimed kinship and brotherhood. John Todd, minister and divine, with such filth about him, did not cry out, "Oh God, where are thy lightnings," but looked at the case in all its loathsome bearings, and passed by it. The affairs in Salt Lake City were very much like the condition of affairs in every other city, with the exception that vices were not tolerated in one place whilst they were in the other. Brazen-faced things went openly on the streets in Utah that elsewhere wore a mask—that were covered up in some way; the underlying theory of saint aud gentile, of Mormon and Christian, in regard to womankind, was very much the same in both places—that a woman belonged to a man, body and soul, and was to serve him till God released her, but the men were not so bound to their wives. The theory was that women were to help men, to derive their existence, so to speak, from them, but not to perfect them-selves, not to make themselves strong and then to give them what aid she could. A woman was a mother to his children, not her own. Her business was to be a wife and mother, and not a woman. That theory was as rife in the highly cultivated City of Boston as it was among the God-forsaken heathen in the desert plains of Salt Lake. John Todd's theory, a theory not only found in John Todd's mouth, but in the mouths of millions of people in America, was that the only duty of woman was that of motherhood—not at all a matter in a spiritual or mental sense, but physically. This was a theory entirely approved of by the Mormons. Stripped of all sentiment, of all glamor, of all delicate words and exquisite sentences, such was the real state of affairs in Utah. It was being stated that women were in favor of the system of polygamy. They were. So were the women of Turkey and Persia in favor of their system of selling females from the shambles. So were the women of this land in favor of being considered the weaker and irresponsible portion of mankind. She had got into conversation with the first wife of a Mormon, who had been legally married in England, and who then loved the man of her choice dearly, and could bear that no one should come between them, but who now was so callous, so stolid-looking, that she apparently did not care how many wives her husband had, or if she cared at all about the matter it was that the more he had the better she would be pleased, and she had drawn this woman into conversation and painted to her her happy English home, and asked her if she had any idea of her husband ever taking to himself another wife if she would have married him. Then she saw the real woman; her heart-strings had been touched and she wept bitterly. Women bore the system; they did not love it. Speak-ing of the Mormon women led Miss Dickinson to speak in a lengthy manner of American women. She did not see why woman should be borne down, by trammels of custom and antiquity as she was. She (the speaker) wanted to see women as well edu-cated as men, who claimed that privilege because they were going to some profession. Had men ever any duties to perform that could compare with those of women? Did not woman form the character of the human race, and for such work as that she required, if anything, finer tools and more skilful hands than man? The ab-surdities of custom! She had seen men enjoy them-selves among the Sierra Nevadas on horseback; she had seen that they could leap on the horse's back, and could move freely in the saddle, riding fearlessly by the side of great precipices, but she had seen that not one of these things could a woman do. It would be decidedly improper for her to vault into a saddle. She must wait for assistance, and then, must be pulled and pushed about in a horrible man-ner, and then afterwards must have help in going down or up a hill, when gentlemen were of course very ready to assist, and smiled and looked pleased, but at the same time voted them nuisances and bores. And then women could not go into danger-ous places because she was so seated on a horse. Miss Dickinson had tried both ways. In just the same way did men and women go riding through the world. Man was allowed every liberty, but this was not the case with woman. She wanted to see nobler types of womanhood and manhood; such types are George William Curtis on the one side and Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the other, The women were not satisfied with their present condition, and their dissatisfaction did not arise from any woman's rights conventions, or anything of the kind, but it was the march of the age. The time was coming rapidly; the boats had entered the stream, and in them were such women as Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, and others, who led the van, and the banks were sur-rounded by men who laughed and jeered, just as they had long ago laughed to scorn Phillips and Gar-rison. But their scorn would be shortly turned to praise, as was always the case at the success of anything. She counselled woman to be sure of her own self-respect, and since God had made her a little lower than the angels and crowned her with glory and honor, let them see to it, as God himself commands, that no man take their crown.

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WHITED SEPULCHRES.
Anna Dickinson Among the Mormons—Revelations of Harem Life and Woman Slavery—Brigham Young Don't Know His Own Children—A Racy Sketch of Society in Salt City.
[From the Boston Journal, 13th.]
Miss Anna Dickinson delivered her new lecture on ''Whited Sepulchres; or, Salt Lake City," on Tues-day evening, at Music Hall. She commenced her address by quoting the old proverb of ''See Rome and die." The new adage should read, "See Salt Lake City and live—live to work." She was aware that there was a growing sentiment in America against work; it was a growing feeling that men should learn from nature and not exert themselves. She had noticed in California that on the prairies there was an immense variety of wild oats and other kinds of crops and herbage that had been there time out of knowledge, and would probably continue time without thought. There were places on that Pacific land, that reached over the length and breadth of it, that had never been cultivated, but which were so beautiful as almost to call out the remark of Charles the Emperor, that "Florence was too pleasant to be looked upon only on holy days." Beautiful as the place was, however, it needed to be cultivated. As she travelled to and fro the streets of the new Sodom (Salt Lake City), and looked into people's faces and considered their existence, and looked at the evil in their midst, and thought of its continuance and the utter absolute carelessness of the people to this thing and about it, and saw how the evil was going on day by day; seeing this, she could not help re-cognizing the measure of damnation that was being filled up against all people that did not exert them-selves in the matter; she stood still and lifted up the voice of her soul and asked to die. But then she would like to live, knowing that there was a work to be done for the elevation of humanity. It was at the close of a beautiful June day that she first looked upon the city of the saints—a vast level stretch of plain; an inland sea of sapphire, reflecting a sapphire sky; range after range of mountains glowing through a marvel-lously clear air, whilst over all ranged the diamond bridge of the eternal wall of snow. In the midst of such a scene rose this whited sepulchre, fair unto the eye, pleasant to the contemplation of the traveller, but whose inhabitants were in the depths of hell. Wide, clean streets, miracles of cleanliness to the Eastern eye, with a stream flowing down the principal avenue, and little branch rivulets flowing through the gutters, so that one might drink the nectar of the gods from his front door. Each hut standing on its own patch of ground, literally sur-rounded and swamped by a mass of greenery, with flowers and shrubs loaded with their productions. Cleanliness, order, quiet—too quiet, in fact, as a stagnant pool was quieter than the flowing brook, but it could not be said to be purer—order perfect, quiet absolute; for the man who ruled Utah and Salt Lake had brains—brains sufficient, if they pleased, to govern this country or any other. Nowhere was there more absolute despotism, a more com-plete illustration of the power of a hierarchy than in the person of Brigham Young. When that man died—and God hasten the day—the bottom virtually dropped out of the tub. Heaven hasten the day! she said, although there would be a vast amount of inconceivably dirty water spilled over the world. The man's power was absolute: he was head of the church and head of the State; he was absolute in authority—religious, civil, military. The territory was districted, the city was districted, and over each of these districts was one of Young's intelligent tools, who was a bishop, a civil magistrate, and a judge of elections at the same time. Utah was not a Territory of the Republic, it was a kingdom of Mormonism; it was not a part of the United States, it was a domain of Brigham Young. The elections there were by ballot, but yet they had the worst features of our open vote, for the system was so under the espionage of these men who presided over districts that each man's vote was known to the authorities, and the voter was accordingly immedi-ately recognized as a faithful follower, a devout brother of the church, to be rewarded and trusted; or he was a renegade, and was hunted down. Every disaffection that grew to open revolt in Utah was speedily done away with by assassination. Regular military organization, each man trained to arms, hatred to the government of the country, were inculcated in a system preached, once a month at least, in which a long list of their grievances against the United States were recounted; a system in which the people were told that the United States had no legal authority over them, and yet enjoining absolute subjugation to their own President, who had a revelation direct from heaven, which he an-nounced the next Sabbath morning, when the wis-dom of government or anything relating to his prop-erty was called into question. And he was always obeyed, even to the giving one-fifth of their subsis-tence—for the benefit of tke church, of course—although Young went to Salt Lake a poor man, and was now the third depositor in the Bank of England. The strangest part of it was that there was not a man in authority in the Territory who was not an American—Ameri-can brains monopolized the houses, the lands, the profits, the emoluments, and the wives. There was a very common mistake in regard to Utah, and that was that the women far outnumbered the men. Such was not the case; there were really more men than women. A great many had but one wife; the majority had no wives at all. The bishops of the church, the apostles, the elders, and the governors of districts, have the money whereby they could support wives, and the young girls there, knowing that they would have an unhappy time if they mar-ried a poor man, looked after the comforts as much as possible. The theory of polygamy was universal-ly adopted, believed, and supported by their lips and by their hearts, but it was not universally put into practice for the simple reason that there was not women enough to carry it out. Order, cleanliness, quiet, peace, on the one side; on the other no schools—the speaker begged pardon, there were schools, buildings that would accommodate 100 to 300 pupils—but they were private family schools, one owned by Brigham Young, and that was filled with his offspring, and others belonging to the promi-nent men there, all crowded, but still belonging to one family. No free schools, no general system of education, no libraries, no reading-rooms, no morality in the streets or in the theatre. The last named institution, like everything else of any value, was Brigham's own property. There was no happi-ness. The people wore a stolid, heavy counte-nance, and their laughter was without mirth. She had gone into the places they called homes, or at least where they lived, and found that as one wife after another came into the room they dropped a little curtesy and fell into a chair, and behaved not as wives, but as tolerated servitors in the presence of a chief. She had seen the children there, and as she heard of five out of six dying, and looked at the puny, sunken, stunted animals that remained, she could not help crying in bitterness to God that they too might be in their graves. She had looked into the houses and saw half a dozen rooms and half a dozen wives; in the theatre, where one man would be attended by a score of women, all of them his wives; where the half circle would be crowded with young girls, the daughters of one man, but the daughters of forty-three differ-ent living women. She heard stories bandied about the streets that Brigham Young would admire girls and afterwards discover they were his own daugh-ters, and about Brigham's son Joseph, who excused himself from the society of United States officers on the ground that he wanted to go and make love to one of his mothers. She had met gentlemen, not illiterate creatures, but men of honor and respecta-bility, and trusted and lifted into the high places of the land by the consent of the people about them, who, in talking of Utah, made remarks which were particularly pleasant for a woman, who loved her own sex, to hear. They thought Salt Lake a capital place, separations were easy, and divorces could be had almost for the asking. How would these men like their own wives, when off on a summer vaca-tion, to speak and act as they, their lords, did. One circumstance that happened to her was amusing. The night she arrived in the city a serenade was given to some one in the hotel—it was not meant for her—and after a while some one cried for "Miss Dickinson." A dispute took place as to whether it was “Miss” or “Mister”—for these people were in the same difficulty respect-ing what are termed strong minded people as the Americans were, and so the problem was solved by some one shouting “Bring it out.” On Sunday she went to their Tabernacle, and saw there sitting in the high places, well met, well received, John Todd; heard him preach a sermon wherein he apostrophized all these people as “fellow sinners and brethren!” She heard him tell a story wherein it was stated that, differences of creed notwithstanding, all good people were sure of eternal salvation. He did not say Mor-mons by word, but if not by implication then what was the story worth? and why was it told? and why in the presence of those people did he say that there was nothing necessary to their salvation but faith in Christ? Who were the men before him? There was Bishop Johnson, whose wives included four sisters and two nieces, and George D. Watt, a church reporter, married to, among others, his own half-sister, and Bolton, hav ing a mother and daughter among his wives, and a host of men who count their twenty and more wives. These were the men with whom this man claimed kinship and brotherhood. John Todd, minister and divine, with such filth about him, did not cry out, "Oh God, where are thy lightnings," but looked at the case in all its loathsome bearings, and passed by it. The affairs in Salt Lake City were very much like the condition of affairs in every other city, with the exception that vices were not tolerated in one place whilst they were in the other. Brazen-faced things went openly on the streets in Utah that elsewhere wore a mask—that were covered up in some way; the underlying theory of saint aud gentile, of Mormon and Christian, in regard to womankind, was very much the same in both places—that a woman belonged to a man, body and soul, and was to serve him till God released her, but the men were not so bound to their wives. The theory was that women were to help men, to derive their existence, so to speak, from them, but not to perfect them-selves, not to make themselves strong and then to give them what aid she could. A woman was a mother to his children, not her own. Her business was to be a wife and mother, and not a woman. That theory was as rife in the highly cultivated City of Boston as it was among the God-forsaken heathen in the desert plains of Salt Lake. John Todd's theory, a theory not only found in John Todd's mouth, but in the mouths of millions of people in America, was that the only duty of woman was that of motherhood—not at all a matter in a spiritual or mental sense, but physically. This was a theory entirely approved of by the Mormons. Stripped of all sentiment, of all glamor, of all delicate words and exquisite sentences, such was the real state of affairs in Utah. It was being stated that women were in favor of the system of polygamy. They were. So were the women of Turkey and Persia in favor of their system of selling females from the shambles. So were the women of this land in favor of being considered the weaker and irresponsible portion of mankind. She had got into conversation with the first wife of a Mormon, who had been legally married in England, and who then loved the man of her choice dearly, and could bear that no one should come between them, but who now was so callous, so stolid-looking, that she apparently did not care how many wives her husband had, or if she cared at all about the matter it was that the more he had the better she would be pleased, and she had drawn this woman into conversation and painted to her her happy English home, and asked her if she had any idea of her husband ever taking to himself another wife if she would have married him. Then she saw the real woman; her heart-strings had been touched and she wept bitterly. Women bore the system; they did not love it. Speak-ing of the Mormon women led Miss Dickinson to speak in a lengthy manner of American women. She did not see why woman should be borne down, by trammels of custom and antiquity as she was. She (the speaker) wanted to see women as well edu-cated as men, who claimed that privilege because they were going to some profession. Had men ever any duties to perform that could compare with those of women? Did not woman form the character of the human race, and for such work as that she required, if anything, finer tools and more skilful hands than man? The ab-surdities of custom! She had seen men enjoy them-selves among the Sierra Nevadas on horseback; she had seen that they could leap on the horse's back, and could move freely in the saddle, riding fearlessly by the side of great precipices, but she had seen that not one of these things could a woman do. It would be decidedly improper for her to vault into a saddle. She must wait for assistance, and then, must be pulled and pushed about in a horrible man-ner, and then afterwards must have help in going down or up a hill, when gentlemen were of course very ready to assist, and smiled and looked pleased, but at the same time voted them nuisances and bores. And then women could not go into danger-ous places because she was so seated on a horse. Miss Dickinson had tried both ways. In just the same way did men and women go riding through the world. Man was allowed every liberty, but this was not the case with woman. She wanted to see nobler types of womanhood and manhood; such types are George William Curtis on the one side and Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the other, The women were not satisfied with their present condition, and their dissatisfaction did not arise from any woman's rights conventions, or anything of the kind, but it was the march of the age. The time was coming rapidly; the boats had entered the stream, and in them were such women as Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, and others, who led the van, and the banks were sur-rounded by men who laughed and jeered, just as they had long ago laughed to scorn Phillips and Gar-rison. But their scorn would be shortly turned to praise, as was always the case at the success of anything. She counselled woman to be sure of her own self-respect, and since God had made her a little lower than the angels and crowned her with glory and honor, let them see to it, as God himself commands, that no man take their crown.